It was probably a stupid decision. The iPad will be almost as much money as my Sp4 was because of how overpriced apple products are in general. I can't believe I'm going to be one of *those* people who actually own a product called the "Apple pencil" and that I willingly paid $130 for this pencil without having a gun to my head.

I will say to start, that the final straw for me was how yesterday, not *once* did my surface turn on when I pushed the power button (since the last update this has been a big problem), and when I was in the metro drawing app (which is a stock app I'll point out), it crashed twice, the second time the device literally just went black and rebooted. All I was doing was drawing with the pen, & I even lost my work.

Nobody was more excited than I was when I heard Microsoft was making the original surface. I grew up with Windows 98 and Windows XP and ever since I was little nothing made more more excited than having a full x86 Windows device in the back of my pocket (seriously how lame was I?!). But anyway I was over the moon when the Surface came out. I've owned a SP2, SP3, and SP4. I would've bought a Sp1 but at the time I was an unemployed student.

But I think I've now learned a very important, very expensive lesson. For what I need a tablet for: the surface line completely blows.

I write software, server software and iOS software. You can't do that very well on a Surface, and I prefer to use something a lot more powerful anyway. I thought that was okay, and that the Surface would be a nice companion device, and at the very least a nice machine to use when I need to run Windows (for light gaming or whatever). But for the software I write (and that most people write tbh) deploys to unix like environments. Unless you're building a game, Windows as a deployment target makes no sense these days, from my point of view anyway.

So I just want a solid companion device. And as a companion device the Surface line brings a lot of skin to the game. I will no doubt be disappointed that I can't torrent movies on my iPad, run Chrome or run any Java software at all. But looking back at the past few years, my ideal tablet is optimized for reading books, taking notes with a pen in a lecture, and web browsing / movie watching in airports and otherwise randomly. And if I'm honest with myself, the Surface is actually *really* bad at mostly all of these things, and I've been apologizing for it and making compromises this whole time.

(note: obviously if you use your Surface as your daily driver then you have a completely different use case to me, and the cases I care about wont be the same as yours)

But yeah, the device is pretty thick so not so great for me to use for reading in bed (plus there's not many good reading apps anyway). OneNote is very very buggy in windows 10 and I've actually recently stopped using my SP4 for note taking for this reason, web browsing on the device is admittedly fantastic, BUT its a battery killer, and would anyone here say Edge or Chrome are touch optimized? (metro IE was but MS killed it off, which is sort of upsetting). Watching movies? Actually the Surface is probably better for that then the iPad is to be perfectly honest, but the difference between the two in this regard is negligible for me (i.e. they both run netflix).

And the bugs. This product has been plagued with bugs. iPads also have bugs, the worst thing that happened to an iPad for me was that I updated to iOS 4 and it wiped ALL my user data. But believe me, the Surface has so many crazy and numerously small bugs that I really consider it a slap in the fact that they'd market these to us without more quality control. I want my tablet to turn on when I push the power button. I want my device not to lose 4% battery an hour in standby, to have reliable wifi, to have good stylus support and a rock solid note taking app. The Surface is many wonderful things, but reliable it is not.

So yeah, I might keep the Sp4 around for a little longer, maybe forever, but I can't see myself carrying on to buy a Sp5 and onward. If I needed a daily driver machine with Windows that didn't need to be overly performant then I'd probably pick one up again, but as just a companion device, I think the Surface is an expensive (and very nice looking) slab of silicone containing many bugs.

I have lots of the same issues with my SP4/16GB/512GB. When I pick up the device in the morning or take it out of the sleeve when I'm about to give a presentation or teach a class or take notes it's always a mystery what it's going to do when I hit the power button. Sometimes nothing and I have to keep pressing it, often until it boots in setup mode; sometimes I need to press both the power and volume up buttons to make it start; sometimes it just starts very slowly and sometimes it even starts right away as it's supposed to!

As for the battery performance, I turned off wi-fi in Sleep mode, set the Surface to hibernate after 15 minutes on battery and did that registry fix to set Maximum Processor State to 90% on battery but even with the screen display down to 50% I don't think I've ever gotten more than three hours of battery life, and frankly, although the Surface screen is fantastic at full brightness it's almost unusable for me at 50% - I always end up pushing it up to full which kills the battery much faster. My 3rd gen iPad battery lasted forever, even with a very bright screen, watching videos and lots of wifi or cellular usage.

Still, the SP4 is my primary work machine so I'm committed to this device, at least for the next year or so. I'm really hoping Microsoft will get these and other issues worked in out an upcoming release.

It was probably a stupid decision. The iPad will be almost as much money as my Sp4 was because of how overpriced apple products are in general. I can't believe I'm going to be one of *those* people who actually own a product called the "Apple pencil" and that I willingly paid $130 for this pencil without having a gun to my head.

I will say to start, that the final straw for me was how yesterday, not *once* did my surface turn on when I pushed the power button (since the last update this has been a big problem), and when I was in the metro drawing app (which is a stock app I'll point out), it crashed twice, the second time the device literally just went black and rebooted. All I was doing was drawing with the pen, & I even lost my work.

Nobody was more excited than I was when I heard Microsoft was making the original surface. I grew up with Windows 98 and Windows XP and ever since I was little nothing made more more excited than having a full x86 Windows device in the back of my pocket (seriously how lame was I?!). But anyway I was over the moon when the Surface came out. I've owned a SP2, SP3, and SP4. I would've bought a Sp1 but at the time I was an unemployed student.

But I think I've now learned a very important, very expensive lesson. For what I need a tablet for: the surface line completely blows.

I write software, server software and iOS software. You can't do that very well on a Surface, and I prefer to use something a lot more powerful anyway. I thought that was okay, and that the Surface would be a nice companion device, and at the very least a nice machine to use when I need to run Windows (for light gaming or whatever). But for the software I write (and that most people write tbh) deploys to unix like environments. Unless you're building a game, Windows as a deployment target makes no sense these days, from my point of view anyway.

So I just want a solid companion device. And as a companion device the Surface line brings a lot of skin to the game. I will no doubt be disappointed that I can't torrent movies on my iPad, run Chrome or run any Java software at all. But looking back at the past few years, my ideal tablet is optimized for reading books, taking notes with a pen in a lecture, and web browsing / movie watching in airports and otherwise randomly. And if I'm honest with myself, the Surface is actually *really* bad at mostly all of these things, and I've been apologizing for it and making compromises this whole time.

(note: obviously if you use your Surface as your daily driver then you have a completely different use case to me, and the cases I care about wont be the same as yours)

But yeah, the device is pretty thick so not so great for me to use for reading in bed (plus there's not many good reading apps anyway). OneNote is very very buggy in windows 10 and I've actually recently stopped using my SP4 for note taking for this reason, web browsing on the device is admittedly fantastic, BUT its a battery killer, and would anyone here say Edge or Chrome are touch optimized? (metro IE was but MS killed it off, which is sort of upsetting). Watching movies? Actually the Surface is probably better for that then the iPad is to be perfectly honest, but the difference between the two in this regard is negligible for me (i.e. they both run netflix).

And the bugs. This product has been plagued with bugs. iPads also have bugs, the worst thing that happened to an iPad for me was that I updated to iOS 4 and it wiped ALL my user data. But believe me, the Surface has so many crazy and numerously small bugs that I really consider it a slap in the fact that they'd market these to us without more quality control. I want my tablet to turn on when I push the power button. I want my device not to lose 4% battery an hour in standby, to have reliable wifi, to have good stylus support and a rock solid note taking app. The Surface is many wonderful things, but reliable it is not.

So yeah, I might keep the Sp4 around for a little longer, maybe forever, but I can't see myself carrying on to buy a Sp5 and onward. If I needed a daily driver machine with Windows that didn't need to be overly performant then I'd probably pick one up again, but as just a companion device, I think the Surface is an expensive (and very nice looking) slab of silicone containing many bugs.

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I'd recommend looking at the Samsung Note 10.1 tablet, which runs Android OS. I find it to be a good intermediate device that gives a lot more bang for the buck than iDevices.

Yeah. If I buy another windows tablet in the future I think I might buy a worse spec'd something that's thinner, has a lot of battery. Portability over performance for me.

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I am still very happy with my Surface 3, but I expect a lot from a Surface 4. It shouldn't take too long before that is presented. I hope they will improve a lot when it comes to how thin and light the device is. The Atom X7 processor is doing quite a good job and with the 4GB RAM version it is very capable of handling a lot of jobs and act as a descent iPad Air/iPad Pro 9.7 competitor.

I have no complaints about my S3 4/128. It does a lot and it's given me virtually no problems. I have a Note3 phone, but I am not impressed with Android. My wife has an nice Android tablet, but she seldom uses it. My next phone will most likely be an iPhone 6S+ (my wife has one & uses it as a phone & a tablet) unless MS comes out with a phone with a pen.

It was probably a stupid decision. The iPad will be almost as much money as my Sp4 was because of how overpriced apple products are in general. I can't believe I'm going to be one of *those* people who actually own a product called the "Apple pencil" and that I willingly paid $130 for this pencil without having a gun to my head. I will say to start, that the final straw for me was how yesterday, not *once* did my surface turn on when I pushed the power button (since the last update this has been a big problem), and when I was in the metro drawing app (which is a stock app I'll point out), it crashed twice, the second time the device literally just went black and rebooted. All I was doing was drawing with the pen, & I even lost my work. >

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My condolences... on both your SP4 and iPad. I have an SP3 that's still running Win 8.1. I absolutely love it and it hasn't given me a single problem. From all the problems I've read about with the SP4 and Win 10, I may never upgrade to 10.

I am still very happy with my Surface 3, but I expect a lot from a Surface 4. It shouldn't take too long before that is presented. I hope they will improve a lot when it comes to how thin and light the device is. The Atom X7 processor is doing quite a good job and with the 4GB RAM version it is very capable of handling a lot of jobs and act as a descent iPad Air/iPad Pro 9.7 competitor.

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It would be great if they just went the thinner/battery route, although they seem to have gone larger/worse battery since the SP2!

I have no complaints about my S3 4/128. It does a lot and it's given me virtually no problems. I have a Note3 phone, but I am not impressed with Android. My wife has an nice Android tablet, but she seldom uses it. My next phone will most likely be an iPhone 6S+ (my wife has one & uses it as a phone & a tablet) unless MS comes out with a phone with a pen.

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I have a Nexus 9 and I've been using it more and more. They're definitely more for the dollar than an iPad. I chose to go the iPad route though because I like the split screen and PiP features iOS recently added, and also I've noticed the nexus slow down over time. I guess it's getting older now.

My condolences... on both your SP4 and iPad. I have an SP3 that's still running Win 8.1. I absolutely love it and it hasn't given me a single problem. From all the problems I've read about with the SP4 and Win 10, I may never upgrade to 10.

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for the life of me I can't figure out why Microsoft didn't make a touch friendly version of Windows 10.

Like getting rid of the swipe back gesture in the browser, as well as making battery life worse in Windows 10.

...for the life of me I can't figure out why Microsoft didn't make a touch friendly version of Windows 10.

Like getting rid of the swipe back gesture in the browser, as well as making battery life worse in Windows 10.

It's definitely a step backwards from 8.

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I literally just upgraded my phone to Win 10 and am going through hell! I should have remembered what I told you. First it deleted ALL of my data, though it appears that my music and picture files are still there. Then it refuses to link up to by Microsoft (hotmail) account. I've entered my email address and password at least seven times, make that nine now. Each time it says that my account was set up successfully, but it isn't. It requires me to re-enter the information when I go to my email, calendar or contacts.

Sorry to hear about all of the issues you have been experiencing with your Surface Pro 4. I have a Surface 3 (non-Pro) that's replaced my iPad and has resolved my issues of getting stuck when web browsing when I see a page or link or video and get the error "This is not available on mobile". Also, if I see an interesting article and it says "Check out the sound clip here" and the link doesn't show up to click due to the mobile nature of iOS not supporting the content on the page. At least on the Surface 3 I can see/hear the content on my Surface 3 while the iPad is stuck and I end up having to put the iPad down, power up a laptop, then view the content, then power the laptop off and pick up the tablet again, rinse repeat.

Also, in my experience, issues have gone away with updates. Issue with not powering up? Windows update fixed the issue. Issues with not charging? Another update resolved the issue. WiFi issues? Update again. Sound quality and video issues? Update fixed the issue again. I don't know what to say about the Surface Pro 4 not powering up reliably right now, but I bet there's an update coming out to fix that. There is no updating that could ever fix the iPad getting stuck on sites that don't support mobile OS'es.